photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Aaron Wright, left, appears with court-appointed attorney Gary West on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, in Douglas County District Court.

For the second time since he was charged last summer with murder, a defendant has been ordered to undergo a competency evaluation to see if he is fit to stand trial.

Douglas County Judge Amy Hanley has ordered the defendant, Aaron Blake Wright, who is accused in the stabbing death of 35-year-old Jina Reyes-Woehler, to undergo a competency evaluation by Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center.

Generally, a person is deemed competent to stand trial when he is able to understand the charges against him and to assist in his own defense.

Wright’s court-appointed defense counsel, Gary West and Madeline Muller, requested the evaluation last week, just three weeks before Wright’s trial was set to begin on Aug. 3. Prior to that request, those attorneys had sought to withdraw from representing Wright in the murder case and in two less serious cases based on his conduct and his expressed dissatisfaction with them, but Hanley kept them on the case after ascertaining that Wright was still willing to work with them.

One of the issues in the motion to withdraw was that Wright was bypassing his attorneys and sending letters on his own to the judge and to prosecutors — conduct for which Hanley admonished him, telling him that ex parte communications were improper and that legal strategy was the purview of his attorneys.

In her order for the competency evaluation, Hanley directed Bert Nash to consider any information “related to Mr. Wright’s ability to rationally assist in his defense.” She ordered that the evaluation’s results be reported to her prior to Aug. 3.

If Wright were found to be incompetent, he would presumably be sent to a state hospital until his competency were restored.

Wright was also ordered to undergo a competency evaluation in December 2025, as the Journal-World reported.

Wright has been charged with second-degree murder in the death of Reyes-Woehler, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and mother of two whose body was found Aug. 29, 2025, behind the vacant VFW building in the 1800 block of Massachusetts Street. He is also charged in two other cases with burglary, attempted theft, criminal threat, battery on a law enforcement officer and disorderly conduct.

Last year, an attorney appointed in those two cases was allowed to withdraw after he claimed that he could not be effective. In his motion to quit representation, attorney Razmi Tahirkheli told Hanley that Wright had been filing his own motions with the court and was insisting that Tahirkheli “adopt those motions,” though Tahirkheli said he could not do so in good faith. Tahirkheli also wrote that Wright’s communications with him regarding his cases were “nonsensical and immaterial to the facts of the case.”

Wright, a resident of the Lawrence Community Shelter at the time of Reyes-Woehler’s death, told police that he had been drinking alcohol with Reyes-Woehler and others the day she died. According to allegations in his arrest affidavit, he was found the next morning with numerous bloodstains on his clothes, but he denied involvement in the killing, claimed that he had blacked out and blamed other men for the crime.

Wright is being held on a $1 million cash or surety bond in the Douglas County Jail. He has a lengthy criminal record, including two convictions for attempted first-degree murder in Douglas County in 1996. He was released from prison in that case in 2013, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections. He was accused of having sent an explosive device to the home of a woman who shared his last name.